Tom Perez, the Democratic National Committee chairman, met with editors and reporters from The Wall Street Journal in Washington yesterday. Here are five takeaways on what Mr. Perez said in a wide-ranging interview:

On setting up the DNC for success. Mr. Perez says the Democrats have lost power in Washington and in state capitals across the country in part because “we ignored some of the basics” over the past few years. He said the DNC needed to boost its resources, echoing Hillary Clinton’s recent criticism of the Democratic Party’s governing body. “We need to build a technological infrastructure for the 22nd century.” (A note to Daybreak readers: There are many election cycles to go before the dawn of the next century, which is 84 years away.)

When asked to respond to Mrs. Clinton putting part of the blame for her 2016 defeat on the DNC, he said: “I said throughout the campaign that we have to up our game at the DNC at every level, including but not limited to technology.”

On broadening the appeal of the party: “We simply can’t move forward by talking about what we oppose from Donald Trump, we’ve got to be putting forth our affirmative case about what we stand for,” he said. “We have to talk about the issues that keep people up at night,” such as expanding health care and protecting the environment. On his shortlist of red states he thinks the Democrats could turn blue are Arizona, Mississippi, and Texas.

On bringing the Democrats together: “I think some of the existential threats in front of us have created some remarkable opportunities for us to unify,” Mr. Perez said. “What we saw across America was just remarkable lock-step unity in the efforts to educate folks about how much we’ve accomplished as a result of the passage of the Affordable Care Act.” Mr. Perez acknowledged the health law has flaws. “A big part of the challenge, for all of us at the DNC, is to translate this moment into a movement, into votes, and to sustain success.”

On the state of health care:The DNC chairman also addressed Republican efforts to undo Obamacare. When asked about ACA insurers pulling out of some markets — a development that started before the election and has continued since — he pointed the finger at the Republicans. “They’re deliberating creating uncertainty in an effort to tank the marketplace. There’s no doubt about it.” Asked if Democrats should run campaigns advocating for a national single-payer health system, Mr. Perez said he’d “leave that up to individual Democrats.”

On why Trump won: “I think why a lot of folks voted for Donald Trump who may have voted in the past for Barack Obama is because they viewed him as a change agent and an outsider.” When asked if he thinks the Democrats could take messaging cues on trade and other economic issues from Mr. Trump, Mr. Perez said, “I don’t know what Donald Trump stands for, frankly, on trade,” adding, “I think we have to educate folks not only on what he is doing that’s going to make it harder for them on their bread-and-butter issues, but what we will do for them to earn their trust back.”

After the U.K. suffered its third major terror strike in recent months over the weekend, WSJ’s Gerald F. Seib sees several lessons for the U.S.

WSJ STORIES YOU SHOULDN’T MISS

A 25-year-old government contractor was arrestedover the weekend and charged with leaking a secret report to a news organization that described some of Russia’s election-related hacking activities, according to court papers and U.S. officials briefed on the case. The Justice Department didn’t identify the news organization in court papers, but a U.S. official confirmed it was the Intercept, which on Monday afternoon posted online a document that it said was produced by the National Security Agency and which concluded Russian spies hacked computers of a U.S. company “to obtain information on elections-related software and hardware solutions.”

President Trump’s Washington hotel received catering, lodging and parking payments linked to Saudi Arabia as part of a lobbying campaign by the Gulf kingdom against controversial terrorism legislation last year. The payments were disclosed by the public relations firm MSLGroup last week in paperwork filed with the Justice Department documenting foreign lobbying work. Ethics officials have raised questions about foreign government payments to the Trump Organization.

Results of a standardized measure of reasoning ability show many students don’t improve much over four years—even at some flagship schools, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of nonpublic results.

HERE’S A LOOK AT THE DAY AHEAD

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION: President Donald Trump meets with National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster at 11 a.m. He also meets House of Representatives and Senate leadership at the White House to discuss health-care reform and tax reform at 3 p.m., signs a bill at 4 p.m., and hosts some members of Congress for dinner at the White House at 6:30 p.m. Vice President Mike Pence participates in a Senate Republican policy lunch at 12:55 p.m. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson meets with New Zealand Prime Minister Bill English and New Zealand Labor Party Leader Andrew Little in New Zealand. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross holds joint press conference with Mexican Secretary of Economy Ildefonso Guajardo Villarreal on Mexican sugar exports at 1:45 p.m.

CONGRESS: Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly testifies at a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on President Donald Trump’s 2018 budget at 10 a.m. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos testifies about the budget before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee at 10 a.m. The Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee holds hearings at 10 a.m., including one to examine the nomination of Kevin Hassett to be chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers at 10 a.m.

ECONOMIC INDICATORS: The Labor Department releases the job openings and labor turnover survey for April at 10 a.m.

WHAT WE’RE READING AROUND THE WEB

By complaining that slow Senate confirmationsare to blame for empty spots in his administration, President Donald Trump “is offering a diagnosis of the problem that is plain wrong,” writes Jonathan Bernstein of Bloomberg News. “While Democrats have indeed been slow-walking executive branch nominations, almost all of the fault for the vacancies lies with Trump, not the Senate.”

The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler examinesthe claim by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt that the Trump administration has brought back tens of thousands of coal jobs and finds it “deeply misleading.” The administrator is including jobs that actually are in oil and gas operations rather than coal, a change that “has little to do with administration policy — and nothing to do with coal mining.”

“Britain is a soft target for terrorism because we Britons are too nice,” writes Tim Stanley of the Telegraph. “This isn’t a criticism: it’s what makes the country such a wonderful place to live. But we are culturally ill-equipped to deal with conspiracies and extremists.”